We visited him in his room in the Kremlin. Every approach to this room was guarded by a sentry. We were required to show our passes several times before we reached the inner sanctum. He received us quietly but graciously. An artist was engaged upon a bust of him whilst we talked.
He is a small man with a bald head, having a fringe of reddish hair at the back and a tiny red beard. His mouth is large and his lips thick; his eyes are red-brown, and possess the merriest twinkle. Do not, gentle visitor, when you meet the great man fall victim to this twinkling eye, and make the mistake of thinking it betokens a tender spirit. I am sure Lenin is the kindest and gentlest of men in private relationships; but when he mentioned his solution of the peasant problem, the merry twinkle had a cruel glint which horrified. “Do you not have a great deal of trouble with the peasants?” he was asked. “Do they not, as in the rest of Europe, object very strongly to the communisation of land?”
“Oh, yes,” was the reply, “we have trouble occasionally; but it is with the rich peasants chiefly. But we soon get over that. We send to the village a good Communist, who explains to the poor peasant the position and shows to him how the rich peasant is his enemy, and the poor peasant does the rest. Ha! ha! ha!”
Lenin’s method with his visitors is clever. He has a most engaging frankness. He suggests by his manner a more or less confidential exchange of opinions. But when the interview is over, it is found that he has told you far less than you have told him.
He impressed me with his fanaticism. This is surely the source of his driving power. And yet I am told that compared with the really fanatical Communist Lenin is mildness itself and should be classed with the “Right.” It was rumoured that he is engaged on a new book to be given the name “The Infant Diseases of Communism,” or some such title, which suggests an honest confession of mistakes made in the early days of the Commune. If this be true there is hope of happiness for Russia yet. But I must confess, his firm belief in the necessity of violence for the establishment throughout the world of his ideals makes one doubt miserably.
He showed a surprising lack of knowledge of the British Labour Movement. He gave to conscious and intelligent Communism a far larger place in British politics than can truly be accorded to it, seeing there is as yet no organised Communist party, but only a handful of extremists of the older Socialist movements.
When asked why he considered a certain individual to be of importance in the political world of Great Britain he gave as his reason that the British Government had arrested her! He did not seem to be aware of the fact that the policy of the British Government during the war was, as a rule, to arrest the little people who were without following and let the bigger folk go free. Scores of examples of this could have been supplied to him had it been of importance, which was not the case.
Lenin believes that a very tiny Communist group, working upon a mass of inflammable human beings, suffering from unemployment and hunger, can make the revolution necessary to establish a new order of society. He urges all Communists in Great Britain to get together in one party and work to this end. He appears to think that the British revolution is imminent. He has no use for the pacifist philosophy of life and believes that only the working classes should be armed and the rest disarmed. He looks for a world-revolution in which the toiling masses shall own and control everything. I do not know from personal speech his opinion on the Polish business; but I was credibly informed that he is more or less indifferent to peace and cares little about the raising of the blockade and the resumption of trade with Great Britain. His view is simple. Everything that promotes conditions favourable for a world-revolution is to be approved. The rest matters little.
At the same time, I believe him to be altogether too sane to be ready to throw away when it offers opportunities of really beginning to develop the Communist State.
Lenin, like all the Communists, conveys the impression of awful sureness of himself, of an immovable and overpowering self-confidence. It is not the smiling self-complacency, the shallow cocksureness of that very common individual amongst us who is sure that wisdom will die with him. It is the deadly certainty that he is right and everybody who differs from him is wrong, of the scholar and fanatic who would sacrifice his own head as readily as he would sacrifice yours in the believed interests of the thing he loves. The war has proved the danger of entrusting the world’s training and the affairs of State to professors. And Lenin is above all things the keen-brained, dogmatic professor in politics.